Past Read: The Suffering of the Immigrant

Sayad, Abdelmalek. The Suffering of the Immigrant. (New York: Polity, 2004)

What kind of life is it when, in order to feed your children, you are forced to leave them; when in order to ‘‘fill’’ your house, you start by deserting it, when you are the first to abandon your country in order to work it?

-The Suffering of the Immigrant

Abdelmalek Sayad’s posthumously published The Suffering of the Immigrant (2004), translated by David Macey from the French La double absence: Des illusions de l'émigré aux souffrances de l'immigré (1999), is no less than a tour de force. A deft combination of sociological and anthropological theory with a series of case studies, Sayad’s text is a complex and compelling contribution to theories of immigration/emigration, cultural anomie, post-colonialism and nationalism. Sayad examines the stories of several Kabyla men who left their homes in Algeria to seek work in France, thus becoming part of the burgeoning immigrant population from former French colonies. These immigrants, so often decried as a problem or a threat by French nationals, are left in a cultural borderland, never quite belonging in France, struggling to find and form familial bonds and increasingly alienated from their homelands and from their French surroundings.

The original French title, The Double Absence: From the Illusions of the Emigrant to the Sufferings of the Immigrant, encapsulates Sayad’s theoretical stance: immigration and emigration are two sides of the same coin, yet they have been notably undertheorized because they revolve around issues of presence and absence. The host country (France) tends to perceive immigrants as threats or problems because of their presence, and thus talks about them almost exclusively in “digestive” terms, advocating “assimilation” and “integration.” The goal of the host country is to erase cultural barriers; to Frenchify the immigrant so he/she no longer seems alien or threatening. The country emigrated from, in this case Algeria, ventures an equivalently negative discourse of emigration, despite the fact that most people in Algeria have friends or relatives who have emigrated. Because emigration is inherently a lack, an absence - because the friend or loved one is not there to provide context and form to the concept of ‘emigrant’ - emigrants are spoken of abstractly and belittled, often in terms of their perceived blights on the economy, or, in the case of women, their perceived betrayal of cultural values through their deportment and comportment (117). For the immigrant/emigrant, this notion of absence is doubly felt because of his (Sayad’s interviewees are all male) sense of cultural alienation in his new country.

Sayad offers many insights into the discourse of immigration/emigration. Despite the clear existence of the aforementioned presence/absence dialectic, Sayad explains that countries immigrated to produce a “superabundance” of literature on the subject of immigration, and countries emigrated from rarely produce any literature at all on emigration. Still, the emigration literature that does exist is a mirror image of the immigration literature, and this, for Sayad, is significant: The fact that immigration discourse is negative, and forces the immigrant/emigrant into a liminal cultural and national space, leads directly to the creation of an equivalently negative emigration discourse.